“Providers are increasingly turning to big tech companies to help their data mining efforts, according to an article at Bloomberg Businessweek.

Vendors such as Microsoft, SAS, IBM and Oracle are giving mounds of data the once-over in an analytics industry that generated more than $30 billion last year, according to research firm IDC. That figure is expected to grow to $33.6 billion in 2012–and healthcare is a leading customer.

The practice of data-mining, however, raises concerns. Hospitals have been criticized for mining patient data as a means to market to the most lucrative patients, for example. And data mining only exacerbates the concerns of patient advocates such as Deborah Peel, founder of Patient Privacy Rights, who recently told Forbes that people will avoid seeing doctors if they feel their information isn’t secure.”